Mistress Eira brushes a thumb over my hairline. “You have to, dear girl. You don’t have a choice.”
“Please, Mistress.” I rake in an inhale, fixing her with my watery gaze. “Tell me honestly. Does it get better?”
She gives me a half smile. “It does. That I promise you.”
But I look away, unable to believe her.
“Eira! Come!”
At Madam Himura’s call, Mistress Eira starts to her feet. “I’m so sorry, Lei,” she whispers. “There’s nothing I can do. You’ll have to find a way to bear it—and I know you will. You are stronger than most of the girls who come here.”
As she turns to go, I strain against the bands to lift my head. “My father,” I say. “Tien. This won’t affect them, will it? They won’t be harmed?”
She hesitates. “I don’t think so. At least, the King hasn’t shared any such plans with us.”
Relief wings through me. Then I add, “Do you know if your messenger managed to deliver my messages home? I still haven’t had any replies, and it’s been over a month now…”
“I’ll be sure to check,” Mistress Eira replies, already turning. “Now, I really must go.”
After the door closes behind her, there’s the thud of boots outside—a guard taking watch.
I slump back. Squeezing my eyes shut, I try to slow my breathing. Light in, darkness out, I remind myself. My father and Tien are safe. The King gave me a lead about Mama. Things aren’t so bad. Light in, darkness out.
But no matter how hard I try, it doesn’t work. As the minutes tick by, I draw in breath after breath, and all my lungs find is darkness.
I dream of home that night.
Not the nightmare—this dream is quiet and calm, a stitched patchwork of glimpses from my past life, the small world in which I lived before coming to the palace. Wind stirring leaves in the garden. The smell of herbs. Tien’s pattering footsteps in the shop. A cough from a room above. Baba? Mama, even, before she was taken? Throughout, I stand like an echo in the middle of it all, unable to move and feeling only the edges of tears in my eyes.
Odd, how time works. On long days in the shop, I’ve known it to stretch out forever, as thick and heavy as molasses. Other days—days filled with fun errands or festivals—time would take on a brittle, icelike quality. I’d race through it and it’d snap into pieces around me, crystalline moments of happiness and laughter, and before I knew it, the day would be gone.
The time I spend locked in the room passes so slowly I begin to forget what life was like before my imprisonment. Hunger gnaws my belly. I’m given a bowl of water each day, and sipping it gives me some relief, but I still feel hollowed out, as though someone had scooped my insides with a giant ladle, fed my core to the earth.
And I miss the girls. Not Blue, of course, or Mariko. But the others. Since coming to the palace, I’ve been surrounded by so many women that I’m only alone at night, and even then I can hear the soft sleeping sounds of the girls in their rooms nearby, sense their closeness, the dreams flitting behind their eyelids. I didn’t realize how much I’d miss that before it was taken away.
Over time that realization leads to another: that I have made a home here. Somehow, these walls, these rooms, have become as familiar and comfortable to me as my little shop-house back in Xienzo. And the girls within them, too. Because though I haven’t managed to find my mother yet, I’ve found something else during my time here.
Friends. A new kind of family, even, albeit a weird, dysfunctional, at times infuriating one.
Still. Family. A home.
The guilt is so strong I double over, gritting my teeth to stop the tears.
On my fourth night of confinement I’m struggling to sleep. It’s been hot all day, and without windows, the air in the room is trapped and close. To cool down, I’ve loosened my robe and am lying spread out on the floor, skin begging for just the slightest brush of a cool breeze. I watch the ceiling through half closed eyes. There’s cricket song from the grasses beyond the house, but other than that the night is quiet. So I notice it immediately when the tread of the guard’s boots outside my room disappears down the corridor.
I sit up with a struggle, weighed down by the bands at my ankles and wrists. For a few moments, nothing happens. Then I sense movement in the hallway.
The hair stands up on my arms. It could be the Demon King. He told me he has ways to get into Women’s Court. Perhaps he’s decided he doesn’t want to wait anymore and has come to take what I refused him.
I stagger to my feet. It’s not graceful, and I’m hunched over from the weight of the bangles, puffing heavily, my vision swimming. Yet I blow out an exhale and force myself to stand steady. I’ll face him on my feet even if it kills me. But when the door glides open a few moments later, the figure that steals inside is smaller than the King, and infinitely more lovely.
“Lei?” a low, husky voice whispers.
“Wren?”
I move forward, realizing just as I do so that four days of no food is really not conducive to a person’s ability to keep herself upright.
Wren catches me just as my knees buckle. Looping an arm round my shoulders, she helps me to the floor. She doesn’t let go straightaway, and a tremor runs through me at how close she is, her warm hands on me. The fresh, oceanlike scent of her unwinds in the air, stirring something deep in my chest.
“What are you doing here?” I ask, keeping my voice down. “The guard could be back any minute.”
She shakes her head. “Not for a while.”
“How do you know?”
“I’ve watched him,” she says simply, as though it were nothing. As though spying on royal guards were completely normal. “He always leaves around now for half an hour or so. There’s a girl here he goes to.”
“One of us?”
She doesn’t answer. Instead, she digs into the folds of her robes, pulling out a small package wrapped in a banana leaf. “Here. I thought you might be hungry.”
Her fingers graze mine as she hands the package to me. I peel the leaf back to see a bundle of rice peppered with roasted peanuts and tiny fried fish. The fragrance of the coconut-steamed rice rises out, hot and sweet, already liquid on my tongue. I’ve never smelled anything more delicious.
I battle the urge to immediately inhale the whole thing. “I don’t know what to say,” I murmur, and Wren smiles, eyes shimmering in the darkness.
“Good,” she replies. “You’re not supposed to say anything. You’re supposed to eat.”
The room is windowless, the only light coming through the rice-paper panels in the door, and even that is weak, an amber tint from the sole lantern in the hall. In the shadows, it’s hard to make out the details of Wren’s face. Still, something about her seems different. It takes me a few moments to realize that it’s the first time I’ve seen her smile. Properly, I mean. Openly, widely.
Unguarded.
It completely transforms her. Gone is the hard, closed mask she usually wears, replaced instead with a lightness so beautiful it’s dazzling. Her eyes are upturned, crinkled. She even has dimples.
“What?” Wren asks with a lift of a brow.